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Sonic Superstars – not as good as Mania but better than most (Picture: Sega)

GameCentral reviews Sega’s new 2D Sonic The Hedgehog game, that tries to mix modern visuals with the gameplay of Sonic Mania.

Sonic The Hedgehog is a cautionary tale of how easy it is to turn a much loved, globally famous mascot, into what amounts to a warning sign for bad games. Some of that negative reputation may have been undone by two surprisingly watchable films, but more trust was earned back by 2017’s Sonic Mania – a beautifully crafted love letter to the original 1990s Sonic that comprehensively outshone its decades old inspirations.

Sonic Superstars is from different developers and eschews Mania’s delightful faux 16-bit graphical style in favour of shiny 4K. It also chucks out the £16 price tag but retains the classic fast-moving 2D side-scrolling of yore, making it a combination of new and decidedly old school. Based on its now six-year-old competitor, can it reasonably justify its much higher price point?

Starting out on Bridge Island, a setting that’s more than reminiscent of the original Sonic’s Green Hill Zone, you’ll find plenty that’s familiar. Choosing Sonic, Tails, Amy or Knuckles the Echidna, you sprint through levels that delight in sending your cartoon avatar around loops, plunging across multiple screens, and finding excuses to spin in tight circles before triggering a brightly coloured explosion.

As is traditional, you’ll be collecting gold rings, which you lose in their entirety when you run into an enemy, spikes, fire, or any number of other environmental hazards. While you can usually pick up a few remaining rings as they bounce away from you, there are also numerous dangers that will insta-kill you, sending you right back to the previous checkpoint. That’s a feature we’ll return to later.

Embedded in the familiar-feeling levels are occasional giant gold rings and what look like sparkling black holes. These lead to bonus levels where you collect more rings, find collectible Sonic medals, or swing after chaos emeralds – with each one you collect permanently unlocking a new power. These are typically ballistic, letting you briefly become a missile you can fire around the screen or triggering an army of Sonics to help take down a boss, but one emerald also shows secret platforms if any are on screen when it’s activated.

The powers are odd, in that other than the hidden platform spotting ability (which we never once managed to use successfully) the others are only ever helpful during boss fights, one of which you’ll find at the end of every act – with most worlds comprising two acts. The bosses look magnificent, most using Dr Eggman’s signature style of creating huge anthropomorphic robots to stamp and barbecue Sonic into oblivion. Unfortunately, other than their unarguable good looks, all are monumental letdowns, featuring bland attacks and little to no progression over the course of battle.

Sadly, the same is true of the mini-games, which range in quality from forgettable to annoyingly arbitrary. Although technically they’re optional, they’re used to gain the chaos emerald powers which are in turn needed to make the boss fights bearable rather than interminable, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to enjoy the process.

It’s just as well some of the levels are so good. Lagoon City, with its glorious looping waterslides and jets of water that send you tumbling through the air, and a section in Pinball Carnival that has you hopping between moving rollercoaster cars as they weave up and down, deserve special mention, but there are plenty of areas with the same spirit of riotous invention.

Superstars is also entirely at ease with ratcheting up the difficulty out of the blue, which is something of a Sonic tradition. Players familiar with Eggmanland from Sonic Unleashed will probably still wake up sweating, thinking they’re back there. In this case the difficulty comes both from ruthlessly hard sections and a strong reliance on the instant death mechanic mentioned earlier.

Sonic Superstars – the gang’s all here (Picture: Sega)

That’s mitigated to some degree by generous checkpointing, with markers placed directly before every section where you’re likely to spend a lot of time retrying. It also avoids the trap some past Sonics have fallen into, of placing a checkpoint without any rings nearby, effectively giving you a single life to work with on each attempt. That being said, its habit of dropping spiked blocks on your head negates any rings you may have saved up, sending you straight back to the last checkpoint.

There are a lot of new mechanisms built into levels, even if most of them simply toss Sonic into the air or, more frequently, spin him in high-speed circles. The biggest addition, though, is drop-in couch co-op with up to three friends, playable in battle and story modes.

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Local co-op is a rarity on its own, but four-player really feels like a treat, the game automatically letting stragglers boost forward to join the leader if anyone falls behind. It’s unfortunate that this generation’s consoles have such expensive controllers and so few reasons to own more than two, but those considerations are hardly Sega’s fault.

With its UHD levels whipping past at light speed, and especially with a friend or two in co-op, Sonic Superstars’ occasionally creative level design is a pleasure to explore and carries a serious challenge at times. Its boss fights and mini-games are disappointingly pedestrian, and very little in this game feels as glorious as Sonic Mania, but compared to the usual output from Sonic Team even a mild success feels like a revelation.

Sonic Superstars review summary In Short: It’s no Sonic Mania, but this is still one of the better attempts to create a modern day 2D Sonic The Hedgehog, with impressive visuals but boring boss battles.
Pros: Truly spectacular set pieces in the best tradition of Sonic. Local co-op works well and each of the available characters jumps and handles differently.
Cons: The patchy difficulty can occasionally feel frustrating and the best bit of every boss fight is the moment it’s over. Expensive compared to the superior Sonic Mania.
Score: 7/10

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £54.99Publisher: SegaDeveloper: Arzest and Sonic TeamRelease Date: 17th October 2023Age Rating: 3

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